Comments on manuscript - Githubissues

Awesome work, here are some comments

[x] "Dark spots arise due to the suppression of convection in regions of intense magnetic field, resulting in a locally cooler (and hence darker) photosphere." Can you add a citation or link to nice review? Ignore if it's Berdyugina 2005 It is!
[x] "In discrete spot models like the ones discussed above, the degeneracy-breaking prior is (typically) the assumption that the spots must be circular, have uniform contrast, and sit atop an otherwise uniform photosphere." Do the gridded models also assume an active latitude? If yes, can you add those words here? Not usually, I think, but it would be easy to incorporate such a prior.
[x] Section 4.1, first 3 paragraphs: You did already introduce the null space in enough detail in the introduction, I think you can cut these paragraphs down fairly significantly, but I don't feel very strongly. I think this is now fine given the splitting into two papers.
[x] "This has the effect of reversing the null space: under only linear limb darkening, it is the even modes that would like in the null space." Do you mean be in the null space?
[x] "In reality, the true limb darkening profile of a stellar surface is more complicated than a two parameter quadratic model can capture" Do you have a nice citation for a work we could read about limb darkening laws, and why they are more complicated?
[ ] "In practice, of course, we will never know the limb darkening coefficients exactly, so we must either model them or marginalize over them (see §5.3). This will dilute our ability to infer surface properties exactly." Planets and occultations would greatly help you constrain limb darkening, might be nice to nod to that here.
[ ] "As a rule of thumb, if the amplitude of variability exceeds 10%, we recommend not normalizing the light curve in this way," I think in the normalization problem section you mentioned that 2-4% was the cut off?
[ ] "This implies that there is no preferred time (or phase) and that the spatial covariance is the same at all points in time. " + "(i.e. spots to do not preferentially form at the same longitude on the surface)"
[ ] At the end you list future work, but don't say you're going to implement the algorithm.......maybe add a bullet point saying you'll apply it to satisfy an observation focused reviewer?
[ ] Time evolution stuff -could- be a separate paper
[ ] Section 5.4, by using in conjunction with starry, will this greatly improve the constraint on the spot properties, and allow to constrain full map (inc null space)?

rodluger / starry_process

Comments on manuscript #5